From the different courses I have taken through the MET program, there have been countless discussions and insights to the usage of technology for educational purposes. From where technologies are used, to how and why they are used, to the prospective uses, all of these discussions are rooted in treating technology as the tool to augment and support our experiences. Ong’s Orality and Literacy (1982) brings forth another point that I have not taken the time to consider previously: the fact that technology can dictate and fundamentally change our experience and thinking, to the extent that people with sufficiently different exposures to technology might never wholly understand the thought process of the other.
On page 31, Ong writes “[f]ully literate persons can only with great difficulty imagine what a primary oral culture is like, that is, a culture with no knowledge whatsoever of writing or even of the possibility of writing.” (1982) Though I had been aware of oral cultures through various documentaries watched throughout the years, and can remember being impressed by their acute memory (I’m not alone in this) – “[l]iterates were happy simply to assume that the prodigious oral memory functioned somehow according to their own verbatim textual model” (Ong, 1982, p. 57) – the differences in the manner of thinking was something I never truly appreciated until reading that one statement, one that seems so evident after the fact. Ong goes on to describe the lack of abstraction for oral cultures, and the difficulty in understanding the need for it (1982), which when paired with the word “object” and the list of differences (Chandler, 1994)
Spoken word Written word
aural visual
impermanence permanence
fluid fixed
rhythmic ordered
subjective objective
inaccurate quantifying
resonant abstract
time space
present timeless
participatory detached
communal individual
reminded me of a personal experience while learning to code. When I first learned computer programming, I was taught a more process-oriented coding style. Later in university, I was introduced to C#, which is an object-oriented language. Initially, I could not for the life of me understand the syntax and logic of C#. It was counter-intuitive and restrictive. It was not until the summer following the completion of the course that I had gained an understanding of the utility and power of object-oriented programming. The understanding came suddenly, like a switch being flipped. One moment I was befuddled, the next, clarity.
Ong was not writing about computers, but rather of print. But my own experience with the different programming languages compels me to believe that the essence of the impact of differences in technology to our own thinking remains the same. In fact, knowing that something so similar as two programming languages can so utterly confound my though process urges me to consider not what can technology bring to my students, but rather how has technology made my students different from me. Their understanding and experiences of the world has been drastically different from mine. Information used to be costly, now they are at the fingertips of anyone who deigns to look, which inherently lowers the value. Now that I know there can exist a gap between the thought processes, comes a never-ending effort to understand and address it, but it will not be easy. Even trying to write to reflect a more oral manner has led to difficulties in both punctuation and flow.
References:
Ong, Walter. (1982.) Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Methuen.
Chandler, D. (1994). Biases of the Ear and Eye: “Great Divide” Theories, Phonocentrism, Graphocentrism & Logocentrism [Online]. Retrieved, 8 August, 2009 from: http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/litoral/
Kamille Brodber
June 7, 2018 — 11:00 am
Benson,
I totally agree with you that “technology can dictate and fundamentally change our experience and thinking”. I too have fallen into the folly of believing that my students are simply not trying hard enough or that they don’t have their priorities in order. The truth is that we are from two distinct cultures with different ways of thinking.
Ong’s (2002) writings on the differences between oral and literate cultures can be extended to those who speak different languages or come from unfamiliar cultures. It is very difficult in many instances for those of who are from one culture to understand and appreciate the ways of thinking of a different culture. Reflecting your post in this light led me to think about the culture of my students being different from my culture.
Prensky (2001) in highlighting the cultural divide between teachers, whom he refers to as Digital Immigrants and students, whom he refers to as Digital Natives, notes that “our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language (p. 2). ” It is clear, as you have also pointed out, that we must view our students at thinking differently and even using a different language.
The issue however, is that many Digital Immigrants are unwilling to recognise the cultural divide and to adjust accommodate the Digital Natives. This is typical of situations where two cultures are meeting up, the one with upper hand expects the other to assimilate and not the other way around. However, students are different and as Prensky (2001) notes that it almost impossible for the Digital Natives to go back and learn the language of Digital Immigrants. If we want our students to succeed and our societies to grow, we must acknowledge the cultural shift and be willing to learn their new so we can be more effective teachers.
adam sheard
June 8, 2018 — 5:15 pm
Hello Benson and Camille,
I really enjoyed reading both of your posts! When I was reading Ong (1982) the first thing I thought about was, similar to how Kamille noted, how incredibly wide the cultural gap is between my younger students and I. I feel like as teachers we have the tendency to teach from the depths of our own personal experiences which are ultimately dictated by the texts that have permeated every facet of our lives since our childhoods. In very much the same way as our grandparents have looked upon our lives with disdain telling us countless times of the days they went to school when it snowed every day and they walked uphill both ways, now we see this new generation which perceives and indeed ‘lives’ text in a different way from our own and think they aren’t ‘learning right.”
What you both brought up in your roles as teachers make me feel like as we get older we are trying to colonize the minds of our youth with the textual norms that we have growth accustomed over the courses of our lives. Looking at the examples Ong gives of how we approach people from aural cultures, we do the exact same thing to them as we assume that without a written text to represent their language they are somehow beneath us and can not survive without our help.
The most ironic thing of all is despite the fact that our natural biological instinct is to pass on our textual understanding, which is confined to the technological allowances of our time leaving us trapped in our own soon-to-be-anachronistic time bubble, we ultimately can’t pass on anything anymore as the textual realities of the next generation will be an entirely different animal. It seems to me that at some point after the creation of efficient written text that generations became not only immortalized but also irreparably separated. This draws a stark contrast to the oral cultures where the generations are still intricately connected. What do you all think about this theory?